Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard

Famously known as “the yellow brick road”, Tsar Osvoboditel translates as “Liberator King” and refers to the Russian Tsar Alexander II. Thanks to the war he waged against Turkey, Bulgaria was also able to gain its independence from Ottoman rule in 1878.

Tsar Alexander was a reformer and expansionist, freeing the Russian serfs and modernising municipal government and the legal system. He added parts of Central Asia to Russia’s territories, but sold Alaska to the United States in 1867.

Alexander’s greatest foreign policy achievement, however, was the successful war of 1877-1878 against the Ottoman Empire, which resulted in the liberation of Bulgaria and an annulment of the conditions of the Treaty of Paris of 1856.

On March 13, 1881, after several unsuccessful attempts, a member of the People’s Will, a terrorist offshoot of the populist movement, assassinated Alexander with a hand-thrown bomb.